Gizmodo's Guide To All The Car Tech At CES 2016 And The Detroit Motor Show

Cars are the new tech. This year's CES show showed us all manner of new gadgets and gizmos stuffed into the steering wheels of our dinosaur-explosion-powered personal transportation devices, so we've rounded them all up into one place. Roll up, roll up, for your first look at a drone taxi and, um, Microsoft Office in your car.

We'll keep this post updated as more news rolls in from the 2016 Detroit Motor Show, so check back if there's anything you think we've missed. Feel free to let us know in the comments below, too!

The overriding sense you get from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, wandering the north hall where all the US’ major car manufacturers show off their latest cars and what they see as the next five or ten years in personal transportation, is that big, fuel-guzzling vehicles are on their way out.

Ford is — finally — adding Apple CarPlay and Android Auto to a lineup of apps for the SYNC connectivity system. With Apple Carplay iPhone users can access Maps, messages, Phone and Music via Siri or touchscreen. Andoid users will get Google voice search, Google maps, Google Play Music among other features via steering wheel controls and touch screen with Android Auto.

Nvidia has announced its first in-car artificial intelligence supercomputer at CES. It sounds like it should turn any vehicle into a computational powerhouse, capable of performing 24 trillion deep-learning operations every single second.

1000 electric horsepower. 0-100km/h in under three seconds. A top speed of 320km/h. These are the wild numbers that startup electric car manufacturer Faraday Future is touting as possible with its future electric vehicles, and it’s showing a visually appropriate concept car — one that conveniently doesn’t have to back up the company’s big talk — called the FFZERO1.

Detroit is more than a little worried about the tech-centric future of automobiles, namely the ones that drive themselves. So it’s no surprise that GM is investing $US500 million in Lyft to build a network of autonomous cars. Why not just buy the whole company?!

Ford was rumoured to announce a partnership with Google today at CES in Vegas, but the 115-year-old auto manufacturer has other tricks up its sleeve: Namely, curious new partnerships with Amazon and Chinese drone-maker DJI.

Nvidia’s Drive PX 2 car supercomputers will see their first real-world test just next year, when they will be used in Swedish carmaker Volvo’s Drive Me autonomous car pilot. The Drive PX 2 enables autonomous cars to use a kind of artificial intelligence called “deep learning” to navigate roads safely.

Say goodbye to your relaxing drive to and from work every day. Harman is working with Microsoft to put an end to those few minutes of wasted productivity by bringing parts of Microsoft’s Office suite to your car’s infotainment system.

Falling asleep at the wheel can have have deadly consequences, but a driver who’s too distracted can be just as dangerous. So Harman has developed an in-car monitoring system that tracks the dilation of the driver’s pupils to determine how overloaded and distracted their brain might be.

I’m not what you would call a “car guy”, but upon strolling up to Ford’s flashy new autonomous research vehicle yesterday, I found myself nodding my head with great satisfaction like, “huh, this shit’s really gonna work!”

Officially cementing CES as the next great auto show, this week Faraday Future unveiled its electric car concept platform that the company hopes will let it compete with the likes of Tesla. And possibly Wayne Enterprises, because the FF-O1 is clearly something right out of Batman’s garage.

Let me put this bluntly: Smart homes are pretty dumb. Or at least historically, connected devices for the everyman’s house have seemed gimmicky at best. This week at CES, however we saw some new technology that stands to reform our very conception of how homes work.

In the same way that only a handful of American cities are seriously preparing for self-driving vehicles, it seems the US federal government isn’t thinking ahead either. US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx revealed this week that his department has no plans for national regulations around autonomous cars.

The idea is a full face helmet that doesn’t come off under impact, yet is easy to remove after impact. The end result is strapless — whilst still fitting better than traditional helmets. The Vozz helmet has been developed by Aussie duo John Vozzo Mark Bryant, inspired by a sky diving helmet.

Here’s a great idea: why not use extra fossil fuels to deliver fossil fuels to your fossil fuel-guzzling vehicle? Yes, there are apps in the US — several of them now, in fact — where you can summon a car to fill your car with petrol. Not just in an emergency situation when you run out of petrol, NRMA-style.

Adverse weather conditions have long been considered one of the biggest barriers in the development of self-driving vehicles. Now, Ford has announced that it’s been testing its autonomous cars in the snow.

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